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Monday, July 8, 2013

Wednesday Thoughts

At NRO, I offer some thoughts about the House GOP's strategy for immigration reform. The caucus is due to meet on Wednesday to discuss this issue. Here are a couple of the points I make:

The Senate legislation won’t “fix” the nation’s immigration system.
Like Reagan’s 1986 amnesty, it provides legalization before
enforcement. It is larded with loopholes for executive discretion and
abuse. It creates huge new government programs (such as the Bureau of
Immigration and Labor Market Research) to oversee the economy. Its
guest-worker programs undermine market principles and will put new
pressures on the middle class. It will not end illegal immigration.
A
House “compromise” bill that keeps most of these features would be a
very small improvement over the Senate bill. Any plan offering
legalization first would basically be saying “In Barack Obama We Trust,”
at a time when Americans, in the recent string of scandals, are
otherwise running up against new reasons not to.
The Senate bill fixates on “border security,” but border security is not
the only point at issue for illegal immigration. Enforcement within the
U.S. is crucial; currently, about 40 percent
of illegal immigrants are visa-overstayers, a percentage that could
grow under the Senate bill because of its increase in the number of
temporary visas offered each year. Despite the promises of its
supporters, the bill will not end illegal immigration, and it might not
even make much of a dent or reduce it at all. The Congressional Budget
Office’s most optimistic estimate
is that the bill, after all the extra billions that the Corker-Hoeven
amendment would send to the border, would cut illegal immigration by a
third to a half. That reduced flow could still lead, the CBO implies,
to over 7.5 million illegal immigrants in the United States by 2023.
That fails the standards professed by Senator Rubio and Senator Schumer.
And that number assumes that the promises of enforcement will actually
be somewhat realized. There is a very good chance that various
provisions — from the fence to the Border Patrol “surge” to E-Verify —
could also be put off (witness the Obama administration’s recent
decisions to postpone key parts of the health-care law).
Money isn’t everything. Some very large donors may be
pushing “comprehensive” immigration reform, but all the money in the
world won’t necessarily carry to victory a party without a solid
governing philosophy. For a political party, victory at the polls is far
more important than vacuuming up donor dollars. Recent electoral
history is littered with candidates — from Meg Whitman to Linda McMahon
to Rudy Giuliani — who spent big bucks for minimal electoral success.
While President Obama significantly outraised
Senator John McCain in 2008, this time around Mitt Romney — when
individual candidate totals, party funds, and super-PAC spending are
accounted for — probably spent
about as much as President Obama did. Yet with all those extra hundreds
of millions in spending, Governor Romney barely won more votes than
Senator McCain and improved on McCain’s share of the popular vote by
less than two points and won back two states. And this modest
improvement was in an environment much less favorable to Obama than in
2008, which was one of the worst electoral scenarios for the GOP within
recent memory.
Lacking a message that addressed some of the
central concerns of the economic middle, Republicans struggled with the
working and middle classes in 2012. That contributed to the defeat of
their presidential nominee and many of their congressional contenders. A
Republican candidate can raise a billion dollars in 2016, but without a
forward-looking economic policy, conservatives should look forward to
more disappointment on November 8, 2016. With its likely downward
pressure on wages and economic opportunity for those at the economic
middle and margins, the Senate bill could prove a stumbling block for a
message of popular economic uplift.